Everybody is an expert. It’s true. For proof, just look around the Internet at all the proclamations that people are making about all sorts of things. It happens in all areas, especially in SEO. I never saw so many SEO experts with pages that can’t rank for beans in my life. And these same people are spouting off about how you have to do this and you shouldn’t do that and on and on. Well, don’t believe everything you hear because a lot of it is based on faulty information. This article is going to explain.

Best way to get my point across is with an example of how faulty info can make its way to the mainstream way of thinking. This is why I always test everything out for myself.

John Doe puts up his new site. He does nothing more than basic SEO. By that I mean, he has some anchor text on his pages, proper meta tags and enough content so that the site doesn’t look like a ghost town. A few days later, without doing any backlinking or anything else, John Doe’s site is number one at Google. John Doe then gets on his favorite SEO forum and proclaims that basic SEO is all you need to get your site to the top of the search engines.

What John Doe failed to tell anybody is that his site is in a niche so obscure, targeting keywords that are so obscure, that when you actually do a search using those keywords, you find that there are only 10 sites on the Internet that even have them on their pages. Of course he’s number one. The other sites probably know nothing about SEO at all. He’s gotten away with just the basics because every other site has done absolutely nothing.

Okay, I understand that this is an extreme example, but I used it to illustrate a point. When people start making proclamations about how this thing or that thing works and is the be all and end all of SEO, you need to take that proclamation with a grain of salt. Because more often than not, the person giving you that info has left out a vital piece of the puzzle. It could be any one of a number of things, including not telling you something that they DID do that REALLY made all the difference in the world.

Point is, SEO is not just one thing. It’s not even a combination of certain things. What works or doesn’t work for YOUR site will depend on a number of factors, not the least of which is how much competition is out there and what THAT competition is doing with THEIR sites. See, one million competing sites of people who don’t know SEO from a hole in the ground is not the same as one million competing sites put together by marketing professionals. And the only way to find out which is which is to study your competition.

Ultimately, the strategy that works for YOU will need to be tested. There is no one size fits all when it comes to search engine optimization.

Anybody who tells you differently is not telling you the whole story.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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